After the Bell: The case for moving slow — what business and politics could learn from sloths

31 Mar 2025

In both business and politics, there is a great advantage in momentum. Fast-moving businesses have a fabulous advantage of being able to iterate and improve more nimbly than competitors. But you know what is less appreciated? Moving slowly. Two things in the recent past have drawn my attention to the lesser known and definitely lesser lauded virtues of being slothful.

It’s well known that patience is a virtue. Except if you are a sloth. Then it’s a lifestyle.

I’ve been wondering recently about the virtues of moving slowly. Almost every book you read about entrepreneurship or business emphasises and praises moving fast. The notion of moving fast and doing things quickly is widely considered to be sensible, laudable, admirable, and so on. And it’s easy to see why.

Moving fast can upend the opposition in politics. Before anyone really gets the opportunity to raise hell, the deed is done. You establish yourself as a “doer”, a “man or woman of action” and all those other good things. And, of course, there is a big advantage to taking timeous action, because problems tend to get more acute as they build.

In business, the notional advantages of moving fast are theoretically even more distinctive. Moving quickly can create something called “first mover advantage”; you establish brand recognition, capture market share and set industry standards before competitors have time to react.

In both business and politics, there is a great advantage in momentum. Fast-moving businesses have a fabulous advantage of being able to iterate and improve more nimbly than competitors. The feedback loop feeds back faster. And so on. All of this is pretty well known, I guess.

But you know what is less appreciated? Moving slowly. Two things in the recent past have drawn my attention to the lesser known and definitely lesser lauded virtues of being slothful.

The first is the Trump tariffs saga. Seemingly, not a day goes by without some threat of new tariffs being imposed on someone, somewhere, somehow.

Tariffs

US President Donald Trump is now saying, totally unsurprisingly to everyone other than himself, that Russian President Vladimir Putin is stalling on a Ukraine peace deal. Trump said he would win peace in Ukraine “on day one”, which was 70 days ago. So, what does he do? He threatens new tariffs on Russian oil. Sadly, Russia does not sell oil — by far its largest export — to the US. So, Trump is threatening to impose tariffs on countries that buy Russian oil.

But that is not the big issue. It’s not even the imposition of 25% tariffs on cars imported into the US. The big day threatened by Trump is 2 April 2025 because this is notionally “Liberation Day”: the day the US imposes reflective tariffs, sometimes called “mirror tariffs”. This will ensure the imposition of tariffs on countries in line with tariffs they impose on the US.

But nobody really seems to know exactly what this means because it’s actually pretty complicated to impose mirror tariffs. To achieve this, someone must decide which products from the exporting country should have tariffs imposed to offset those unwanted charges. That can be very complicated in the case of countries exporting products that are critical in local production of other products.

And this is before you even consider the effect on consumers, since tariff increases are in effect a tax on consumers; to maintain profitability, local sellers will try to offload the extra cost on their customers. Oh, and then there are the supply chain complications and a whole bunch of unintended falling-domino consequences.

Trump has done this all in an “act now, think later” sort of way. The result is uncertainty, which markets hate, so the S&P 500 is now down 10% since Trump took office, causing BlackRock CEO Larry Fink to write in his famous annual letter to clients that investors are “more anxious about the economy than at any time in recent memory”. But he says the moment will pass, which is another way of saying “keep calm”, which is another way of saying “panic now”. Quickly. Before everyone else does.

The issue of too much speed is also evident locally. I can’t help wondering what would have happened if Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana had increased taxes by a 0.5 percentage point for four years instead of moving quickly by trying to impose a 2 percentage point increase on VAT in one year. My guess is that we would not be sitting with a budget crisis. People would have complained and moved on.

But by moving too aggressively, Godongwana has weakened the position of Treasury, and seems now out of touch with popular sentiment. Godongwana, surely, should have recognised the political risks.

It’s ironic because the person who increased VAT by the largest amount was then Finance Minister Derek Keys, and it wasn’t just a trivial 2 percentage point increase; it was a rate adjustment from 10% to 14%.

Keys was often fond of saying that if you have a big problem, the solution is to lean on it until it goes away. It won’t seem like you are making much progress at first, but eventually by pushing hard enough for long enough, the problem will be solved.

Yet the increase was very quick and very sudden. And it was justified in exactly the same terms as Godongwana’s increase was: it was necessary to address fiscal pressures and strengthen the country’s revenue base.

The difference, I suppose, was the moment: South Africa was then transitioning into democracy. There wasn’t a pall of government corruption hanging over the Mandela administration. Still, in general, I think Keys’s logic about leaning on difficult problems for long periods is broadly wise, befitting a very sage person.

This idea always reminds me of the lyrics to that Leonard Cohen song, Slow.

I always liked it slow
I’ve never liked it fast
With you, it’s got to go
With me, it’s got to last …

I like to take my time
I like to linger as it flies
A weekend on your lips
A lifetime in your eyes

So, sometimes, in some circumstances, take it slow. DM

I just want to apologise for an error in my column on Friday, claiming that Makhanda’s Graeme College and Victoria Girls are private schools. As several thousand (it felt like!) current and former students, and residents, corrected me, they are government schools. Apologies. I was thinking of St Andrews DSG and Kingswood College, which are private schools. I messed up an important story with a silly mistake. I beg your pardon.

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